Command Line Usage

The Bridgetown gem makes the bridgetown executable available to you in your terminal.

You can use this command in a number of ways:

• bridgetown new PATH - Creates a new Bridgetown site at the specified path with a default configuration and typical site folder structure. Use the --apply= or -a option to apply an automation to the new site.
• bridgetown build or bridgetown b - Performs a single build of your site to the output folder (by default). Add the -w flag to also regenerate the site whenever a source file changes.
• bridgetown serve or bridgetown s - Regenerates your site any time a source file changes and serves it locally (http://localhost:4000 by default).
• bridgetown console or bridgetown c - Opens up an IRB console and lets you inspect your site configuration and content “under the hood” using Bridgetown’s native Ruby API.
• bridgetown plugins [list|cd] - Display information about installed plugins or allow you to copy content out of gem-based plugins into your site folders.
• bridgetown apply - Run an automation script for your existing site.
• bridgetown configure CONFIGURATION - Run a bundled configuration for your existing site. Invoke without arguments to see all available configurations.
• bridgetown help - Shows help, optionally for a given subcommand, e.g. bridgetown help build.
• bridgetown doctor - Outputs any deprecation or configuration issues.
• bridgetown clean - Removes all generated files: destination folder, metadata file, and Bridgetown caches.
• bridgetown webpack ACTION - Allows you to perform actions such as update on your project’s Webpack configuration. Invoke without arguments to see all available actions.

Typically you’ll use bridgetown serve while developing locally and bridgetown build when you need to generate the site for production*.

To change Bridgetown’s default build behavior have a look through the configuration options.

Yarn Scripts

Bridgetown also comes with some handy Yarn scripts to help spin up both Bridgetown and Webpack during development, as well as use Browsersync to provide live-reload functionality. Take a look at the scripts configuration in package.json, as well as the start.js and sync.js JavaScript files.

*To build your site for production, you can run yarn deploy so that all the Webpack assets get built alongside the published Bridgetown output. If you need to add an extra step to copy output to a web server, putting that in the yarn deploy script is a good way to go.